Editing Agvan Dorzhiev (section)

== Biography ==

Dorzhiev was born around 1853, by some accounts 1854, in the Buryat region of Transbaikalia, near Lake Baikal.<ref>The discrepancy between the 1853 and 1854 birth years is unresolved in the secondary literature; compare Snelling, John (1993), ''Buddhism in Russia'', p. 15, with Andreyev, Alexandre (2003), ''Soviet Russia and Tibet''.</ref> As a young man he traveled to Tibet, where he spent roughly fifteen years, from 1873 to 1888, studying at the great monastery of Drepung near Lhasa and eventually attaining the highest degree of Buddhist philosophical learning.<ref>Snelling (1993), ''Buddhism in Russia'', ch. 1–2.</ref> On the strength of this achievement he became one of the principal tutors and debating partners (tsanshab) of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, and subsequently served as the Dalai Lama's personal diplomatic emissary to the Russian imperial court, a role that made him a significant figure in the "Great Game" of Central Asian geopolitics, as he worked to draw Tibet into closer alignment with Russia as a counterweight to British influence in the region.<ref>Snelling (1993), ''Buddhism in Russia'', pp. 40–75.</ref>

Dorzhiev settled in St. Petersburg in 1905 as the Tibetan government's representative, and was the driving force behind the construction of the first Buddhist temple in Europe, the Kalachakra Temple (Datsan Gunzechoinei), completed in 1915.<ref>Andreyev, A. I. (2004), ''Храм Будды в Северной столице'', ch. 1–3.</ref> When the October Revolution came, Dorzhiev did not withdraw from public life. He joined the Buryat-Kalmyk Committee in Petrograd and attended the Second All-Buryat Congress, and was briefly arrested and held in Butyrka Prison in 1918, a detention from which he was freed through the combined intercession of the Orientalist scholars Fyodor Stcherbatsky, Sergei Oldenburg, and Boris Vladimirtsov; some later accounts attribute his release instead to Lenin's personal intervention, though the documentary basis for this claim is uncertain.<ref>Andreyev (2003), ''Soviet Russia and Tibet'', ch. 3.</ref>

Dorzhiev subsequently obtained a formal Soviet mandate to conduct pro-Soviet propaganda among Buddhist clergy and laypeople, and through 1919 and the first half of 1920 he and his associates A. Balzhir, Ch. Erdniev, and V. Lidjiev traveled among Buryat and Kalmyk communities explaining "the foundations of Soviet power" to believers.<ref>Sinitsyn, Fedor L. (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты (1917–1946 гг.)" [The Soviet State and the Buddhists, 1917–1946]. ''Российская история'' 1: 62–76, p. 64.</ref> He worked directly with the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs under Georgy Chicherin and his deputy Lev Karakhan, and reportedly made a strong impression on the Commissar for Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky.<ref>Snelling (1993), ''Buddhism in Russia'', p. 206.</ref> The restored Leningrad temple, looted by a Red Army unit in 1919 but subsequently placed under the protection of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, functioned through the 1920s as an unofficial Tibetan-Mongolian mission and as Dorzhiev's institutional base.

Through the early and middle 1920s, Dorzhiev presided over a series of institutional victories for the renovationist movement: the First Spiritual Congress of Buryat Buddhists at the Atsagat datsan in October 1922, and a Congress of Kalmyk clergy in July 1923 conducted under the protection of a special Soviet mandate issued in his name.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", p. 64.</ref> This period of relative accommodation, sometimes called the "golden age of Buddhism in Russia," lasted until roughly 1925, when Soviet policy began shifting toward administrative and eventually repressive measures, a shift driven partly by the failure of a Soviet diplomatic mission to Tibet in 1924–1925 and partly by the redirection of Soviet revolutionary hopes toward China.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", pp. 65–66.</ref> Dorzhiev nonetheless continued to defend the renovationist strategy through the All-Union Congress of Buddhists in Moscow in January 1927, at which the renovationists secured victory on nearly every disputed point of church governance.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", pp. 67–68.</ref>

In parallel, Dorzhiev sought to extend the renovationist case to an international stage. In June 1926 he asked his academic associate [[Bazar Baradin]] (1878–1937), a Buryat orientalist trained in part under Fyodor Stcherbatsky, to draft theses for a lecture that Dorzhiev himself was to deliver at a planned second, and this time international, Buddhist exhibition in Leningrad, conceived as a sequel to the first Buddhist exhibition of 1919.<ref>Nesterkin, Sergei P. (2024), "Б. Барадин о буддизме", pp. 121–122.</ref> No exhibition program or list of participants beyond Dorzhiev's undelivered lecture survives, and the exhibition itself never took place, apparently crowded out by the campaign against the Trotskyist opposition then dominating public life in Leningrad.<ref>Nesterkin (2024), "Б. Барадин о буддизме", p. 124.</ref>

As repression intensified through the 1930s, Dorzhiev's public role narrowed to that of an increasingly desperate advocate for institutional survival. In October 1933, he wrote to P. G. Smidovich, chairman of the Soviet Commission on Religious Affairs, warning that the surviving lamas of the Buryat datsans were dying out and that those who remained were renouncing their monastic status under the pressure of poverty and legal disenfranchisement, leaving some monasteries with only two or three clergy remaining.<ref>Andreyev, A. I. (1992), "Агван Доржиев и судьбы буддийской религии в СССР" [Agvan Dorzhiev and the Fate of Buddhism in the USSR]. ''Реверс: Философско-религиозный и литературный альманах''. St. Petersburg, p. 197.</ref> On September 1, 1936, by then in his early eighties, he drew up a will and political testament naming his grand-nephew Dylykov as his successor at the head of the Tibetan-Mongolian mission. He departed for Buryatia in August 1937 to spend his final days there, and was arrested near Ulan-Ude that November; the remaining lamas of the Leningrad temple were taken by the secret police the same night, and several were shot the following month. Dorzhiev died in the prison hospital at Ulan-Ude on January 29, 1938.<ref>Sipeykin, A. V. (2024), "Агван Доржиев и конец «золотого века» буддизма в Советской России" [Agvan Dorzhiev and the End of the "Golden Age" of Buddhism in Soviet Russia]. ''Российская история'' 1: 149–160, pp. 157–158.</ref>